O2: no Ice Cream Sandwich for some Sony Xperia owners

O2 won't be certifying Android 4.0 for Sony's Xperia Neo, Arc and Ray handsets, the network operator has said, after testing the OS on these devices and finding it "didn’t meet our requirements".

Says the carrier: "Unfortunately with the Ray, Arc and Neo our testing found that the software update affected the phone’s speed and performance. These issues were present on three separate versions of the Android 4.0 software we tested and are caused by the software having more advanced hardware requirements than previous versions.

"Because the software affects the phone’s performance in this way and because you can’t revert back to an earlier version of Android without having your phone completely restored, we have decided not to approve the update.

"This means it won’t be available for O2 customers on these phones."

Punters will have to stay with their existing Gingerbread installs, there being no further software updates in the pipeline. ®